The Association for Behavior Analysis International® (ABAI) is a nonprofit membership organization with the mission to contribute to the well-being of society by developing, enhancing, and supporting the growth and vitality of the science of behavior analysis through research, education, and practice.

Abstract: This panel will consider the application of behavior analytic principles to clinical problems occurring in developmentally normal, free-feeding adolescent and adult clients. The members of this panel have investigated widening the scope of behavior analysis to attend to a broad range of philosophical and clinically important behaviors less frequently considered in our literature. While the panel will be conversational and include interaction with the audience, several important issues seem to merit discussion. Among those are concerns about the dramatic reduction in work on rule-governance or verbal control and how verbal control interacts with contingencies of reinforcement over time. Issues will be discussed concerning the units of analysis that characterizes research in verbal behavior and how it might miss or underestimate the complexity of real-world verbal behavior, especially as it pertains to personal narratives and the development of extended patterns of behavior over time in pursuit of abstract values. The panel will also raise issues about the use of middle-level terms to explain behavioral principles to the practice community, as well as how this impacts many behavior analysts’ opposition to behavior-behavior relations in causal analysis. At an applied level the panel will discuss the role of direct contingency control in areas such as incontinence, Tourette’s Syndrome, sleep disorders, disruptive behavior, and delinquency. The role of contingent control in interpersonal interactions will be discussed, and the challenges in the use of natural interpersonal contingencies in promoting the development of complex social behavior will be considered.